Devour Your Way Through the Surreal Fairytale of ‘Eat Me’

An adventure game where the solution is to consume the world.

Here's the deal: Having eaten a bottomless hole and being thus cursed with insatiable hunger, you're fortuitously thrown into the dungeon of a castle made out of food.

Chandler Groover writes a handful of pieces of interactive fiction a year, and Eat Me is a particular treat, a game for this year's Interactive Fiction Competition. Like most of his work, it's a story in which fairy tale logic is taken in a horrifyingly, deliriously dark direction. In this case, into a food dungeon.

Of course, you proceed to eat your way through it. Groover has done a lot of previous work with parser games that sidestep the old verb-guessing problem in text adventures by relying on a limited palette of verbs. Here, you interact with the world almost entirely by eating things. Even the game's response to "wait" recasts it as eating: " You consume time."

The writing completely revels in its funny-horrifying-repulsive premise. Guards made of different cheeses, their relative toughness a function of how hard and thick their rinds are.Snobbish nobles are cast as the courses in your meal. There's a Lewis Carroll quality to the ideas and prose here, but the horror has been dialed way up, so much so that it becomes absurd:

The dirty little thrill of adventure games is to act as a spoiler, to walk into an environment and tear it apart as you pick up everything not nailed down and break everything standing in your way. Eat Me gives that pattern a perfect thematic resonance with its surreal plot and setting; you're here to devour this world, and the solution to every puzzle is a matter of what (or who) to swallow when.

Eat Me may put some people off; it luxuriates in the gross and grotesque. It's a niche game in a niche genre. But this is a fascinating piece of writing married to straightforward, but cleverly entertaining, puzzles. And if you haven't played a parser game before, its simplicity of interaction might make it a good on-ramp onto the genre—even if the subject matter is a little hard to swallow.